How does prescribing heroin affect drug-related crime rates?

How does prescribing heroin affect drug-related crime rates?

Michael Jourdan (Drug Researcher) gives expert video advice on: What is a 'heroin injection site'?; What controversial heroin treatments are being tried in Europe?; How do police departments in the United States and Canada react to injection sites? and more...

From the very onset it was not known how much affect one could suspect in regard to reduction of crime when addicts got heroin legally. There were reports from early on that in England prescribing doctors could almost eliminate legal markets in that area, their patients would not steal overall or commit any other crimes. But this was not very documented. It was more a testimonial kind of thing than really science behind it. But once you got into conducting real Heroin trials, we made the statistics as well, you compare with official court statistics and so on. And you found significant reductions in crime in the population of addicts that got people access to Heroine. It was so much that even if there were no other gains from prescription, I think this alone would be one that could make many people sway towards more, let us do it. But fortunately there are also help full issues for the addicts themselves. It is not just a crime fighter. Many drug users lead a life in which there are only two real things that matter. Money and drugs. And that is very unlucky because you cannot keep up your addiction with a job usually. So you resort to doing crime at one time or another, and you get into that circle of committing crimes to pay for drugs. Now people have to acknowledge that a lot of the crimes being done are actually not done because people are under the influence of the drugs, they are under the influence of prohibition. Which means that the drugs are very very expensive and that is why they are doing the crime. Once they get legal access to the drug of their preference, that means there is no need to commit the crime and it is actually not a very comfortable like to be a criminal. It is risky. it is hard. And many people who commit crimes do not like it. They do not like the life of a criminal and they stop once they get legal access. Others continue, but at a lower-level because they do not need to make that much money.